New Hampshire School Bans Urinals Following Debate About Transgender Bathroom Use

A New Hampshire school has banned the use of urinals in its restrooms in response to a debate about gender identity.

The Millford County Schools Board of Education has voted to  “limit the number of students who use restrooms and locker rooms to the number of private stalls,” WMUR reported.

The move comes after a contentious debate about which facilities students who identify as transgender and non-binary may use, the New Hampshire Journal reported.

“We talk about our responsibility as school board members on a divided issue, which is to compromise. This is the compromise,” the Journal quoted board member Noah Boudreault as saying.

This “compromise” follows conflict over a proposal that students only be allowed to use restrooms aligned with their gender at birth. 

One state legislature, Rep. Maria Perez (D-Millford), even went so far as to say that the proposal “doesn’t adhere to human rights,” per the Journal.

The Journal quoted board chair Judi Zaino as saying to vote for the proposal would “be acting with malice to put a population in danger.” 

The Associated Press noted the district’s previous policy was that “students can access the bathroom that ‘corresponds to their gender identity consistently asserted at school.’”

In January 2022, as Breitbart News noted, a 15-year-old biological male student in Loudon County, Virginia, was convicted of sexually assaulting two female students, reigniting a debate about whether biological males should be allowed in women’s restroom facilities.

The WMUR noted that the urinals are currently draped with garbage bags to prevent their use. 

Any effort to implement personal stalls would prove costly:

“That’s going to be quite expensive, and it’s not likely something that we’ll be able to – even if funded and the board chooses to allocate funds to that kind of a project –that we’ll be able to do until summertime,” WMUR quoted Superintendent Christi Mishaud as saying.

The Journal noted there are other implementation issues as well, such as a potentially conflicting requirement that the school maintain ample bathroom facilities relative to the number of students and whether students who need to change for gym classes will be able to do so quickly enough given a fixed number of stalls.